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The Economics of Tourism Destinations pp 511–547Cite as

The State Intervention and the Public Organization of Tourism

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Abstract

When speaking of tourism, there exist positive and normative motivations (see Sect. 2.7) for analyzing those institutions that govern and organize the economic relationships between tourism operators in the market. An institution can be defined as any organization accepted by the members of the society and with the power of regulating the behavior of individuals and to make decisions which consequences fall on the entire community. In fact, as a general rule of the economy, and this is particularly true for the tourism sector, many economic problems can be mainly settled through the intervention of an external authority, either being a voluntary organization (such an association of firms) or a public institution (such a public body), which sets the rules and enables to make them obligatory.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    If the game is repeated with an infinite horizon, the Folk Theorem states that the cooperative solution may be obtained without public intervention, only through individual strategies.

  2. 2.

    Pareto optimality, also called Pareto efficiency, is a situation in which it is not possible to increase the well-being of an individual without decreasing the well-being of someone else.

  3. 3.

    Since the manufacturing sector produces income and employment, the socially optimal solution would not be the one in which industrial production is set to zero, as Fig. 15.1 clearly shows.

  4. 4.

    The socioeconomic impact of tourism and the factors affecting residents’ attitude towards tourism have received some attention in recent years (Akis et al. 1996; Alberini et al. 2005; Crotts and Holland 1993; Faulkner and Tideswell 1997; Figini et al. 2009; Haralambopoulos and Pizam 1996; Lindberg and Johnson 1997a, b; Lindberg et al. 1999; Concu and Atzeni 2012). In particular, the impact of tourism is often disaggregated into three categories: economic, sociocultural, and environmental effects (Ryan 1991; Williams 1979). Since tourism generally disrupts social, cultural, and environmental local systems, the non-economic impact often tends to be negative as a whole (Liu et al. 1987), while economic effects are perceived as positive.

  5. 5.

    Also public bads have an optimal size, which is generally different from zero: think that the absence of pollution, for example, is absence of life.

  6. 6.

    In the most general case, it is possible to demonstrate that the distribution of the tax between the tourists and the firms depends on the elasticity of demand and the elasticity of supply of the tourism service (Mak and Nishimura 1979).

  7. 7.

    Symmetrically, most of these arguments can be used to justify the use of subsidies to promote arrivals at the destination (see the important example of Ryanair, Papatheodorou and Lei 2006) or to contrast crisis management (Faulkner 2001; Blake and Sinclair 2003, for the 9/11 terrorist attack; Pambudi et al. 2009, for the Bali bombings).

  8. 8.

    National organizations, with ad hoc advertising campaigns targeted to selected markets, are able to promote incoming tourism (with the positive macroeconomic effects spreading on the entire economy, Chap. 13) and, indirectly, tourism in the individual destinations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Guido Candela & Paolo Figini

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  1. Guido Candela
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  2. Paolo Figini
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Candela, G., Figini, P. (2012). The State Intervention and the Public Organization of Tourism. In: The Economics of Tourism Destinations. Springer Texts in Business and Economics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20874-4_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20874-4_15

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